About Zimbabwe

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There is a great tragedy about Zimbabwe, and the name of that tragedy is both Robert Mugabe and the United Kingdom who arrived there in the 1880s under the auspices of the British South Africa Company, a company that did not respect the land and its people, but who saw the area as a mere trading opportunity. The history of Rhodesia then Zimbabwe has been well documented elsewhere including a declaration of independence by Ian Smith leading to a civil war that led to the rise of Robert Mugabe and a disastrous decline in the country's wealth and wellbeing coupled with near universal condemnation of how the country is run.

Traditionally, being a land locked country, Zimbabwe has a strong agricultural sector, however, Mugabe's damaging land reform program, where land was seized from white farmers and given to black farmers who did not have the skills to farm their new lands, together with a multi million dollar foray into the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, shattered the economy, with Zimbabwe going broke with a reliance on food imports. Food it could not afford to import given the economic collapse and spirally hyper inflation.

Today around 46% of Zimbabwe's reported population of 13 million are under the age of 18 years (1.6 million of these children are orphans), and literacy rates amongst these young people have plummeted from 80 to just 20% in recent years as family's simply cannot afford the school fees. And for those who can afford to send their children to school, they face class sizes in excess of sixty pupils given a severe shortage of teachers. Many Zimbabwe children, facing a bleak future, even with the uneasy alliance between Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai the opposition leader, have voted with their feet and attempt to flee the country across the dangerous Limpopo river where exploitation awaits. For child sponsorship opportunities in Zimbabwe click here.

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